


the heart is hard to translate

by skogr



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 04:38:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4208238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skogr/pseuds/skogr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two times Garrus woke up in medbay, and one time Shepard did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heart is hard to translate

**Author's Note:**

> (And very excitingly, a Russian translation by Эlиs! <https://ficbook.net/readfic/3612118>)

i.

 

"Let the doc work her magic," Jacob says, and he rests a hand briefly on her shoulder with what would be a comforting grip were it not for the layers of armor between them. She wants to say, _stop pretending you know me,_ she wants to shake his hand off, wants to say, _was it magic after Alchera, too?_

It's good to know that whatever else Cerberus replaced, they left her with a short fuse. No superhuman patience, then. Same old Shepard. She exhales slowly, tries not to think too much about the dark blue smeared across her greaves, lets her shoulder drop in a conscious effort to relax. Jacob's hand falls back down to his side.

Taylor's easy ex-Alliance camaraderie is pleasant and familiar, but falls flat for all his efforts, Cerberus colors sitting comfortably on him in a way hers never will. She's not ex-Alliance. She's not sure exactly what she is, but she's not that.

"Karin's the best," is what she does say, the forename slipping out as if to remind herself that she knows it at all, that they've worked together for years and that the name on the paycheck means as much as you let it.

"That's why we recruited her," Jacob says, and Shepard thinks, _no it isn't_.

She dismisses him with a nod, and for all her lingering distrust of him, he follows her directions without a hint of reluctance. That should mean more than it does, but it's just not what she needs right now, and she scrubs her hands through her hair in wordless frustration. What she needs is, is - well, she still doesn't know, but it starts with that stubborn asshole in medbay whose blood she's covered in. One more miracle, that's all she's asking for.

That's the first thing she does to stop herself pacing outside the medbay windows: peels off her armor and wrinkles her nose at the smell. Turian blood doesn't smell like human blood, whatever makes it blue makes it cloying and sticky and somehow more alien than anything else about them. She'd never found it so objectionable before, but she'd never been covered in it so thoroughly, and it had never belonged to a friend. It’s like paint, like overblown stage blood that doesn’t quite feel real. Like being a kid and pouring ketchup down your face to scare your parents.

She does let herself pace after that, even though she knows it drives Chakwas to distraction, because she's been a tightly wound spring since she woke up in that lab and she needs to do _something_. Jacob's obedience and Tali's reluctance and Miranda's cool indifference she can handle, but what she needs is a familiar voice at her shoulder who'll take no shit but have her back, and she didn’t even know it until she saw him bleeding out in the grime of Omega.

"If I let you see him," Chakwas says, startling Shepard from her agitated laps of the mess, "will you _stop_ pacing?"

"He's awake?"

"No," Chakwas says, beckoning her in, "but he's stable following the initial surgery. I'm keeping him sedated until his vitals level out, then I'll patch him up with the cybernetics."

Shepard follows her through the door, eyes going straight to the occupied bed across the room. Garrus is lying on his side, his uninjured side down and his wounded mandible and neck covered by a thin gauze, looking unnervingly delicate without his armor. She lets out a breath she hadn't realized she was even holding.

Garrus, along with the rest of her alien entourage, had been initially reluctant to let Chakwas treat them, patching themselves up stoically in the cargo hold with hastily applied medigel. She'd all but dragged him up here on more than one occasion, taking delight in turning his polite "not necessary, ma'am" into an irritated "seriously, Shepard, I'm _fine_ ", and seeing him lying there instead of trying to scuttle out at the first opportunity is a very hollow victory.

"Cybernetics?" Shepard asks, thinking of her own. Whatever they actually are. She's in working order, and that's all she cares to know. No doubt Garrus will want the full schematics when he joins the Cerberus cyborg club. "That bad, huh?"

"I don't suppose he'll be winning any beauty pageants," Chakwas says, the old military adage making Shepard grin, "but I'm anticipating full functionality."

"Good to hear."

Chakwas adjusts something at the foot of Garrus' bed before looking back at Shepard with that expression that means she knows only too well what's running through her head.

"You got him here in time," Chakwas says, "he'll be fine. Don't look so worried, Commander, they're a thick skulled bunch, these turians."

"Sounds about right," comes a quiet voice from the other end of the bed, and Shepard laughs despite herself.

Chakwas sighs, casting an amused eye over the datapad she's holding. "Why am I not surprised he burns through sedatives almost as fast as you?"

"Well, look who it is," Shepard says, hooking a foot under a stool to sit by his head. She’s done this so often, is well versed in offering bedside encouragements and making light of injuries that nearly turned disastrous, but always strictly as a CO. She stays standing for those, keeps it upbeat and gently teasing, then gets out of their hair. Commiserate, incentivize, then let them get on with the slow and irritating process of healing without being rushed. This isn’t like that. There are some things beyond commiseration, and she’s not got much to offer in the way of incentives, either. Piss poor odds and an enemy they know next to nothing about. “How’re you feeling?”

The gauze flutters as he shifts his head slightly, but Shepard still can’t see the damaged side of his face. “Not my best day,” he admits, his voice a harsh murmur, which she decides translates roughly as ‘in utter and complete agony.’ Chakwas seems to come to the same conclusion, crossing to the desk and filling a vial.

“This would knock out a krogan,” she says, and Shepard’s lips twitch in a wry smile. “I think it’ll do the trick.”

“I usually just hit ‘em,” Shepard says, “works every time.” It’s only because she’s listening so carefully that she catches the quiet wheeze of Garrus laughing. His eyes are a little glassy, looking somewhere that’s vaguely in her direction but not quite _at_ her. The laughter stops.

“Shepard’s dead,” he says, his voice indistinct. “She died.”

She sucks in a breath, avoids Chakwas’ concerned expression diligently. “I’m right here, Garrus.” He still doesn’t focus on her.

He closes his eyes with a strained flutter, and on an impulse, Shepard grabs for his hands where they lie in front of him, fingers curling and uncurling convulsively. She’s off-script entirely, but that’s just par for the course recently. Dying wasn’t the plan, and coming back from the dead definitely wasn’t the plan, and working for Cerberus is so far from the plan she doesn’t even know where to start.

She’s not his CO. She’s just someone who nearly lost a friend when they need one more then ever. And he - well, she thinks he could use one too. His fingers grip back.

“Go to sleep, Vakarian,” Shepard tells him, “and stop burning through your damn sedatives.”

She has to lean very close to hear his reply. “Don’t go killing any Reapers without me.”

“I’ll leave you some,” she says, “a few small ones, maybe.”

He laughs, even if it’s not much more than a breathy chuckle, and his eyes flutter shut again as his fingers go limp around hers. A part of her wants to stay, but Chakwas is already making shooing gestures in her direction, so she stands up, self consciously disentangling her hands from his.

“You should get some rest,” Chakwas says, giving her a gentle nudge in the direction of the door. “Or do I have to sedate you, too?”

Shepard laughs, a lighter sound than she's heard from herself in days, even if it’s somewhat strained.

Two years is a lot to miss, and two weeks is far too little time for the reality of the months she misplaced to sink in. It felt like an impossible gulf to cross, the years between her and everyone else, but Garrus reached across it like it didn't matter. Like it wasn't partly the fallout of those years that had him making a last, desperate stand on Omega, surrounded by bodies and impossible odds and a stubborn fervour to do the right thing.

She _missed_ him, which makes no sense at all, because for her, it's been no time at all.

"Wouldn't be the same without you," she tells his unconscious form, sincere in a way she hasn't managed since she woke up with Lawson's voice in her ear, and then she lets Chakwas hustle her out the room.

 

ii.

 

The thing about going through the Omega 4 relay with such gung ho flamboyance is that tracking down the Shadow Broker suddenly sounds a lot less ridiculous than it once might have. The crew of the Normandy exists in a strange limbo of sorts, reluctant to disband, staying off the radar of just about everyone, and unsure what to do next. For all that she doesn’t miss Cerberus in the slightest, she almost misses the direction. The objectives. When Liara offers a new project, she leaps at the chance.

Garrus goes down hard in a way she hasn't seen since Omega, and it's only the lack of blood that stops her from fearing the worst. That’s the thing about turians, when they fall, their limbs stop looking powerful and start looking haphazard and spindly. It’s one of her least favourite backdrops to a firefight, Garrus lying there motionless, and she scrambles to his side the first opportunity she gets.

Once she’s finally back on the Normandy, she heads straight for the medbay without even discarding her armor. There's a priority message from Hackett sitting in her inbox and a scientist that needs rescued, but she finds herself getting off the elevator on the crew deck anyway.

"I must be dreaming,” Chakwas says, with an amused glance up at Shepard as she walks in through the door. “My two most recalcitrant patients in my medbay without prompting? Someone pinch me.”

Shepard grins, and drops her helmet on the nearest table with a heavy thud. “No injuries for you today, Doctor. I’m just visiting.”

“Of course,” Chakwas says mildly, and Shepard elects to ignore the knowing smile she directs her way. “I'm afraid you won't get much sense out of him, Commander, I've just given him a rather strong dose of painkillers."

"Actually, I feel fine," comes a voice from the bed, perhaps a bit drowsy but otherwise seemingly coherent. Figures.

"Doing better than Shepard, then," Chakwas says. "Last time I gave her this, she thought I was an angel."

"She's misquoting me," Shepard says, kicking a stool over to sit beside Garrus, grinning sheepishly. "I said she _looked_ like an angel, the light was shining behind her, and - anyway, you are an angel, Karin. I stand by that. Nothing delirious about appreciating your medical genius."

"Your confidence is inspiring."

Garrus turns his head to grin at her, his face relaxed in a way she didn't think turian faces were even capable of. Chakwas has rigged up a headrest to let him lie almost horizontal whilst accommodating his fringe, and Shepard's seen him lounging pointedly on every piece of furniture in her cabin, but she's never seem him this at ease. "An angel, huh? Prefer the kind with a gun, myself."

"Funny." She swats at his shoulder. "Nice nap?"

"Well, you know," he says, "T'soni seemed to have it covered, I figured I could just check out for a while."

Shepard laughs, propping her elbows on the side of his bed. "You had me worried for a moment there, Garrus."

He looks back at her with an expression that might be pleased - might be smug, even - and she knocks an elbow against one of his, but carefully. Her concern is old, but his smugness is new, something picked up along the way between 'what if we did' and 'what if we didn't stop.' They say sleeping with your best friend is complicated, but this is too damn easy.

"He'll be up and about in no time, I'm sure," Chakwas says, fixing him with a pointed glare. "If he actually rests, that is."

Shepard props her chin up on her folded arms and raises an eyebrow at him, fighting a losing battle with the grin that she can't quite contain.

"You heard the doc," she says, as Chakwas crosses the room with a long suffering sigh. "Go to sleep, Garrus."

He leans a little closer, his voice a low rumble. "And stop burning through my damn sedatives?"

It takes her a moment to place the phrase. "You remember that?"

His mandibles flare in lazy amusement, and he stretches an arm out towards her, his hand hovering somewhere near her head. "I wasn't that out of it."

Shepard snorts. "Right. Like you aren't now?"

"It's a good excuse," he tells her, his fingers settling in her hair and sending a pleasant shiver down her spine. He weaves them carefully into the strands behind her ear, and she doesn't let herself close her eyes and lean into it like she wants, but she half shuts them with a faint smile. The hair fixation is probably a turian thing, but she's finding that she likes it.

"Good excuse to what?"

"To tell you that your hair looks beautiful," he murmurs, and they're in the middle of the medbay with nothing more than lowered voices as the illusion of privacy, the worst-best kept secret on the entire ship, and it's incredible how little she cares. Moments like this, they catch her breath, Garrus looking at her with something more open and honest than she ever expected. But even Chakwas' best drugs can't hold the uncertainty at bay for long. "Or should I... was that -"

"What, when it's sweaty and covered in yahg drool?" she teases. "You charmer."

His grin is back, the picture of dopey contentment. “I try.”

And contentment is the word, caught in the aftermath of doing the impossible and the prelude to doing the even more impossible, and it’s... unexpected. They went from awkward to tender to indecent and back to tender without ever really hitting awkward again, and they’d never talked about what happens if they _survived_. Afterwards, they stood in the elevator together, and as Garrus went to select the crew deck she reached across him and pushed for the loft, waiting for him to object. He didn’t. She looked at him as if to say, _well?_ and he looked back as if to say, _we never did finish that wine_.

It was just that easy, like it’s easy to let him thread his fingers through her hair and grin stupidly at him in the middle of the medbay.

“So get better,” she says. “Feel free to burn through those sedatives.”

He frowns. “Shepard?”

“I’ve got better pillows,” she says in a conspiratorial half-whisper, and almost laughs. Commiserate, incentivize. Just with a twist. “I’m even willing to share.”

“That’s... very generous of you.”

She smirks. "I'm an excellent host."

"Is that so?"

Chakwas coughs pointedly and Garrus pulls his hand back looking utterly unabashed.

“I hear you,” Shepard says, meeting Chakwas’ amused gaze with a determined obliviousness. “I’ll leave your patient to recover in peace.”

It's easy to shoot a grin over her shoulder at him as she leaves, it's easy to linger in the doorway with a fond reluctance, and it's even easier to miss his angular presence in her cabin, to think of him as a permanent fixture.

Easy as breathing, and just as unfathomable to think of stopping.

 

iii.

 

Her first thought is that she's dead. Her second thought is that she hurts too much to be dead. Her third is that she's never drinking with Alenko ever again.

Not the two thousand pound krogan or the gunnery chief with a love of shots, but the mild mannered Canadian. That's the one you have to watch. _Must be my latent biotic ability_ , he'd said with a grin, _burns through food_ and _alcohol_.

She'd gestured at herself with a raised eyebrow. _Watch yourself, LT_. _That's fighting talk coming from an L2._

So he'd laughed and slid her another beer. _Alright, Commander, you're on. Show me what those L3s of yours can do._

She'd thought, why not? Not every day you take down a rogue spectre and save the galaxy in one fell swoop. They all deserved a little celebration.

Except that's not right, because she hasn't had L3s for years. Only the best for the Illusive Man's special project, and she's been running on her L5s ever since. Kaidan would be formidable with some, if she could only convince him -

Except that's not right, either, because Kaidan wasn't there when they took down Saren, Kaidan never left Virmire. She hasn't seen his shy, slow growing smile in three years, never had the chance to show him quite what her implants can do. It wasn't Kaidan drinking beside her after taking down Saren, it was Ash matching her shot for shot, Garrus to her left nursing something in a bottle that smelled like toilet water, so she told him so.

 _This_ , he'd said, with an affronted expression, _is extremely expensive turian brandy_ -

He always had terrible taste in alcohol. _Has_. Has -

She didn't know that then, before Alchera, before Omega, before he showed up at her door with a bottle of unrepentantly shitty wine that tasted like oven cleaner, though they never really intended to waste time drinking it. Before Palaven, before the 'good stuff', which still seemed better suited to heavy duty cleaning than actual consumption, but she poured two glasses anyway. They never drank much of that either, Shepard leaning into his space impatiently before too long, the reunion six months overdue.

Before raiding Anderson's liquor stash on Silversun Strip, Garrus triumphantly holding aloft something luridly orange and gently bubbling. They _had_ drank that, and her L5s might burn through alcohol, but Garrus went loose limbed and affectionate after a single glass. _Lightweight_ , she said, and he just grinned and pulled her down onto the couch. It was a nice change of pace to finally take their time.

Before Earth. Before London. Before Anderson bled out by her side.

The memories rush back with a sharp jolt of pain and exhaustion, and she wonders if this counts as her life flashing before her eyes. It doesn't feel like dying.  _Come back alive_ , she thinks, and wills herself to consciousness.

There's a flash of light, and another rush of pain.

"Garrus," she breathes, and she doesn't know where she is but she knows he's there. He has to be. He _has_ to -

His fingers curl around hers, warm and smooth. She grips them back as hard as she can.

She tries again, croaking out the words as best she can through a throat that feels like sandpaper. "Garrus, did it - did I -"

"Save the galaxy? Again?" His voice is warm and gentle, with a quiet lilt of amusement. "Yeah, Shepard. You did."

She tries to lift her head, squinting through eyes that don't want to open. It's an exercise in excruciating pain, so she stops, even as a pair of hands reach out to carefully push her head back down.

"Rest, Commander," she hears, a voice she can't quite place. A doctor, maybe. She hopes they’ve got something strong to give her, because _damn_ , even dying didn’t hurt this much. But first, there’s Garrus. She squeezes his fingers again, feeble but insistent.

"So, I came back alive," she says hoarsely, and she can feel his breath on her cheek as he leans in to hear her. She reaches out her other hand to touch his face, her vision still blurry. Last she saw him, he was pretty banged up himself. She fumbles her way down the paths of his scars, hands clumsy and stiff. He catches her wrist and holds it there, and he swims into focus long enough for her to make out the familiar lines and colors of his face.

"Good," he says, voice almost steady enough to fool her. "I'd hate to have to court martial you."

She tries to laugh, though what comes out is more of an indistinct breathy sound, but he seems to understand her well enough, mandible flaring out beneath her thumb. She wants to joke, to make a suggestive comment about disciplinary action, but she’s just so _exhausted_. Her eyelids are drooping and her lips won’t form the words she wants, and Garrus runs a talon gently across her cheek.

She licks her lips and tries again. "Hope they're giving me the good stuff."

"Only the best for Commander Shepard," he says, concern bleeding through his appropriate bedside composure. He’s not often been this side of the hospital bed. "No angels this time?"

"Just the one," she murmurs, and he lets out a low chuckle. "The kind with a gun."

She can feel her grip loosening on his hand, pleasantly sleepy and increasingly tempted to let it pull her back under.

"Go to sleep, Shepard," Garrus tells her, with the sort of understated fondness that makes her heart ache, "and stop burning through your damn sedatives."

Despite everything, she smiles.

  


 


End file.
